It’s week 11 of the semester and we are far closer to the end of our studio then we are to the start of it. This week was all about getting the last minute touches we needed to piece our short film together and sitting in a dark room underground to work together with the footage we had and see what we could do with it.
I had the SONY EX3 over the weekend, and I had to bring it back on the Monday. I planned to shoot my grandmother cooking, but I wanted the situation to arise organically, i did not want her to cook because I told her to, but I had faith she would as she’s a traditional greek woman and she is always cooking. Yet this weekend she was extremely tired and she was off her feet most of the time. I felt bad asking her to get up and cook, especially if she was fatigued. So, I assumed it wouldn’t happen, and I’d tell my group that I failed them. Then on the Monday morning when I was to return the camera, I walk into the kitchen and my grandmother is making a traditional greek dessert, and she is right in the middle of the entire process. If you could’ve seen how giddy I got, oh boy. I ran and set up the EX3 as quickly as I could as I only had 30 minutes to shoot the footage before I had to take it back to uni (as to not have the techies put me on their black list – a place I fear of being). My grandmother is possibly the most interesting subject I’ve ever filmed, for many reasons. In this modern age, when a person is put infant of the camera it is not really their genuine self, they are hyper-aware of their physicality’s and what the are saying. My grandmother is a very candid woman, she is not apologetic in her beliefs and I’d describe her as somewhat pessimistic. Do not mistake these words as meaning I do not love her, because I do very much. Yet, when a camera is placed on her she almost becomes a more fine-tuned version of herself, she is calm and collected, and after I stop recording she asks ‘was that good’ or ‘shall I do it again?’. She is the type of woman who values hard work and ‘legitimate’ forms of work, she deems filmmaking as illegitimate, but when I was filming her I saw this spark in her that truly enjoyed the entire process which I found very interesting (it’s not entirely shocking though, because she loves to watch melodramatic greek dramas on the television every night). In relation to the film, I believe this coincides with the imagery we’ve been trying to create, this idea of living in the moment, being present and finding your true self. I was extremely happy with what I shot and how it turned out – and so were Lydia and Tim.
On Tuesday I sat down with my brother and a zoom recorder in between us and asked him questions about living in the moment. We talked about specific things and broader topics within relation to ‘the moment’. He said “you know its funny you should ask me about all this because I actually wrote a poem about this exact thing last week” to which I happily said, “please, lease read it”. Safe to say it was perfect for the film, it was poetic, concise and real. You can hear it in the way my brother speaks that he means the words he says, and not only that but the timbre of his voice really makes for nice listening (or as Tim put it “Your bro’s voice is like chocolate dude”). My brother went on to tell me that this was the perfect time to be talking to him about this topic because he feels like this year, in comparison to the rest is the year he’s felt most intense with himself and like he’s living in the moment. We had a great chat, which I believed I was recording but turned out I had not pressed the record button twice and missed it. Technical difficulties will be the death of me but hey, in a way it’s better because we were living in that moment.
On Wednesday we were back in the editing suites, editing our hearts away. At this point, we were all a bit skeptical about the outcome of the film, as we were piecing together what we had but it didn’t look exactly the way we wanted it to. I kept in mind that our film is the type of film that we can only decide whether we truly think works after it is completely finished. We were missing the music and some critical voice overs at this point so we couldn’t make a judgment on whether or not we truly liked it yet. I have found editing with three people is definitely a challenge, as there are many different ways to do things on premier pro and people have their different styles and paces. I’m definitely the worst editor out of the three of us if it takes me a minute to do something it’ll take Lydia or Tim 20 seconds. This has helped me with my editing process, though, as watching them edit has helped me with the way that I will edit projects in the future – so thanks for the tips guys. With one week left to go before we need to submit the project, I think overall I’m feeling pretty confident with the film.
